And here's the thing... I am a huge fan of Moore's work, and I have a lot of respect for him. But he's wrong, and he's wrong in the worst sort of way -- he's being a complete hypocrite.

Anyone recall an Alan Moore series entitled The League of Characters Other Authors Invented But Which I Took and Completely Remade Into A Superhero Team? I mean, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It had characters out of literary classics and stories, characters created by other authors. Moore took those characters and completely reimagined them and combined them together into types of stories very different from what their original creators probably ever would've expected.

How about his series Lost Girls, which takes Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and puts them together in a sexually explicit erotic comic series that includes Wendy and her brothers having orgies with the Lost Boys while a pedophile watches. It also has Dorothy having incestuous sex with her father while a teenage girl. Alice, meanwhile, has underage lesbian encounters with other girls at school, before being raped at an asylum.

Does anyone want to guess how the original authors of those stories might feel about Mr. Moore creating a comic depicting those kids having explicit sex constantly in a comic book? They might be as angry as Mr. Moore is about his comic getting prequels. (It's also worth noting that Moore was dismissive about the licensing claims made by the copyright holders of Peter Pan due to his use of characters.)

The funny thing about Watchmen is, Alan Moore originally intended it to be about Charlton Comics characters who already existed. It was DC editors who got him to rework the story to use new characters; but make no mistake, they are clearly based upon characters who already existed and whom Moore had initially intended to use outright.

In his angry comments to the press today, Moore had the nerve to actually say, as a comparison to the prequels to his own work, that he doesn't recall "that many prequels or sequels to Moby-Dick." Well, Mr. Moore, maybe that's just because you hadn't gotten around to taking it and using it for your own writing yet...

Seriously, though, it's actually shocking to see him directly reference classic literature as a way of trying to make a point about how wrong it is for other people to come along and take a great literary work and reuse it in some new way.

Alan Moore has made a habit of denouncing and criticizing the films adapted from his comics as well. This, despite his own admission that he hasn't actually seen any of them. He just hates them and supposedly knows they are garbage on sheer principle, in part because he thinks the film medium is mostly so worthless and commercialized... Said the man who adapted novels and other types of literature into the comic book medium, which is regularly denounced and derided as not serious art or serious literature by a lot of ignorant people, and which is pretty overtly commercialized as well.